The New Democratic Party of Quebec will soon be a thing. We spoke to its interim leader, Pierre Ducasse, on the phone.

“An alternative for people who want to have a progressive, social democratic voice, but at the same time a party that wants to work within Canada.” That’s what the NDPQ aspires to be in the next provincial elections.

Pierre Ducasse, three time candidate for the federal NDP and once Jack Layton’s “Quebec lieutenant”, officially kicked off the NDPQ public campaign this Wednesday.

“We have to get out of this political void and gloom. Maybe it’s time to give a home – a real one this time- to political orphans,” he wrote in an open letter on Facebook.

The idea has been in the air for some time. In fact, the New Democratic Party first got registered at the DGE in 2012, even if it was just to protect the name. “A few years earlier, a conservative tried to register the name New Democratic Party of Quebec, so we didn’t want that to happen,” explains Ducasse. With only about 300 members to date, the NDPQ is ready to start recruiting. The interim leader is confident that it will be a fully functioning party before the 2018 elections.

“Organizationally, it might be tough, but we can’t give a free pass to this government anymore,” he admits.

Despite the declining enthusiasm of Quebeckers for the federal NDP, he feels that the timing is just right to “shake up the political dynamics” in the province.

What makes the timing right?

For me, the decision to create a Quebec NDP relies exclusively on analysis of the context. That context is that feeling of morosity; the feeling that Quebec is not moving, that there is no project that builds bridges and brings people together. There is the lingering issue of sovereignty where people are still polarized in a way that is not useful.

With Couillard and Charest before him… when we look at it, they are not really liberals, are they? They are more conservatives…. This has to stop because we sense so much arrogance with this government, scandal after scandal. Ethics and fighting corruption: they are not our number one priorities and they should be.

At the same time, I think a lot of Quebeckers are fed up with the constant polarization around the national question. A lot of Quebeckers – it’s been clear from the polls- don’t want another sovereignty referendum. But, sadly, the PQ and others want to bring us in this direction.

Between the unconditional federalist partisans of the Status Quo on one side and the unconditional independentists on the other side, the rest of the population feels held hostage. We need to find a way to move beyond this debate – well not beyond it, but beyond how it’s debated ducasse-fbright now.

Except on the independence issue, your positions seem similar to Quebec Solidaire’s. Are you concerned about splitting the left vote?

I said repeatedly that we can’t steal the votes from other parties for one simple reason: the vote belongs to the citizens; it doesn’t belong to the parties. Some people think that Quebec NDP would divert support from QS mostly, others think that it would be at the liberals’ expense mostly… The only way to know is to do it.

One thing I can say for sure is that I do not consider Québec Solidaire my opponent or my enemy. For me the adversaries are these right-wing policies, whether they’re from the liberals or from any other party: those austerity policies, the lack of focus on education and health and fighting poverty. And right now they are embodied by the Quebec Liberal party – who is ideologically closer to a conservative party.

How many people do you think vote Liberal, not because they necessarily like them, but because they could never vote for a sovereignist party? A lot of people say ‘we hold our nose while voting”. Well, maybe holding our nose is not something we should do while voting,

Your assessment of Quebec’s political landscape is pretty harsh. Referring to the Liberal party, you said “when we ask for nothing, chances are we will get it.” What is the NDPQ going to ask of Ottawa?

It’s too soon to get into specifics, but look at the Liberals… what I’m saying is they have not put forward a vision, like: this is how we see provincial-federal relations, these are the issues we’d like to work cooperatively with other provinces and these are issues where we might have a different approach…

Sadly, the only two files in which we had a sense that the Couillard government really took a firm stand against Ottawa, were in terms of pensions and healthcare. And in both cases, it was, in my mind, the wrong decisions! When the federal wanted to strengthen the pension plan and the Régie des rentes du Québec: that was an example of when we should have worked with other provinces. I certainly support the principles of the Canada Health Act and certainly support that we can’t have more health care privatization, but we shouldn’t wait for somebody else to tell us.

The federal NDP has had a rough time since last elections, especially in Quebec where it lost 75% of its membership. Why would Quebeckers be interested in a provincial version of it?

I was there, building the party in the beginning of the 2000s with Jack [Layton], and I remember a time when we had 1% in Quebec. That didn’t stop us: we believed in the project and we moved forward and a decade later there was the Orange Wave.

I’m well aware that the 2015 elections did not have the results we had hoped. We’ll see what happens federally. The liberals tend to talk on the left, but for a lot of issues, it’s the same policies as Harper.  But the federal Liberals are at least pretending to be progressive, where the Quebec Liberals are not even pretending!

The Quebec NDP would be independent, there is no automatic affiliation between the two but there is certainly an ideological proximity with the Federal NDP. Many members might be involved in both so, the ideas are similar, but it doesn’t mean they will be exactly the same all the time. If it’s a distinct autonomous party, it means that it may not be always exactly the same.

 

Over the next few months, the NDPQ will be forming riding committees and organizing training sessions about Quebec’s electoral law for its members.

The World Parliamentary Forum opened on Wednesday in Montreal with very notable absentees. Ottawa denied visas to six of the invited foreign parliamentarians. Organizers and participants suspect that this attitude is linked to the leftist orientation of the event.

The World Parliamentary Forum (WPF) is the closest thing to a world convention of left-oriented politics. It is organized in context of the World Social Forum (WSF), an international event where politicians, militants and other actors meet to discuss and advance global alternatives to capitalism. Montreal is hosting the event from August 9th to August 14th. It is the 12th edition of the WSF and the first taking place in the Northern Hemisphere.

However, the chosen location is proving inaccessible to an unexpected number of people. Canada denied visas to more than 200 people who wanted to attend the WSF.

On Wednesday, politicians from here and abroad, along with some civil groups, are meeting in UQUAM to discuss the issues and the future of left-wing politics for the WPF. But six representatives from Palestine, Columbia, Malaysia, Mali and Nepal won’t be able to take part. One co-organizer of the event and one ex-presidential-candidate of Mali were refused, among others.

Apparently, immigration authorities were not convinced that their stay was intended to be temporary. A strange concern, considering that the people in question are all elected members in their home countries’ parliaments.

Alexandre Boulerice, a NDP MP, called the decision “indecent and shameful” in a statement to Le Devoir. “It’s completely silly,” he said, “those people regularly attend international forums.”

André Fontecilla, from Québec Solidaire, believes that Ottawa’s decision deliberately targets elected members of the political left. He affirmed to Le Devoir that “it is certain that if this was a forum promoting free-trade, the response would have been completely different. Those people could have entered the country without problems”.

The ministry of immigration maintains that the decision has nothing to do with politics. Visa demands are being treated on case-by-case basis. Decisions are not taken by politicians but by simple civil servants.

“Parliamentary or not, if they don’t fit the criteria, they cannot come,” said Félix Corriveau, spokesperson for the Immigration Minister John McCallum. “We simply can’t know who those people are.”

* Featured image from the @FSM2016QuebecWSF Facebook page

As I’m writing these words this morning, the situation is becoming direr for the Kurdish resistance in Kobane. So far, the resistance has bravely faced the 22 days long assault lead by ISIS. Meanwhile, here in the West, there are a lot of conflicting views regarding the supposed defeat or victory of the People’s Protection Units (YPG). One thing is for sure, though. The struggle of the PKK and the YPG will go down in history and may have the opportunity to mobilize the whole of Kurdish people in a renewed struggle for “national’’ liberation.

Protests erupted yesterday in the Northern Iraqi Kurdish Autonomous Region, Turkey, in Rojava (the Syrian portion of Kurdistan), and Iran in support of the Kurdish resistance in Kobane, but also in support of what has come to be known as the Rojava Revolution: the struggle to establish a network of autonomous communes, which function within a framework of radical direct democracy.

Unfortunately the spontaneous uprising of thousands, if not tens of thousands of Kurds throughout Kurdistan and beyond was met with tear gas and violence by the Turkish authorities. The clashes between Turkish law enforcers and protesters claimed several lives as of the latest news.

kurt taksim
“ISIS murderer, AKP complicit.” From a protest in Istanbul, Turkey on September 21, 2014.

Meanwhile, the United Nations called for direct action in support of the Kurdish combatants to prevent a massacre. Several Western government officials have also voiced their concerns about what they think will definitely be a major military setback, if ISIS were to overrun the Kurdish forces in Kobane. So what’s preventing the Western powers from attacking ISIS? Wasn’t that exactly the main reason for our intervention?

Many of the proponents of an intervention against ISIS have championed the idea, that without the support of the Turkish government, the long-term defeat of ISIS seems implausible, and that in order to defeat ISIS any international coalition needs Turkish support. This being said, however, think, for instance, of the picturesque moment, when Turkish tanks turned their backs on Kobane. If the non-involvement of the Turkish forces is an indication of anything, it is that the Turkish government has no interest in stopping ISIS’s assault against Kobane.

Little is known of the Turkish “non-involvement” in the past three years during the war in Syria, but one thing is certain. The policy of “non-involvement” was merely a façade. There is strong evidence that the Erdogan administration, in a strategic gamble to topple both the Assad regime and prevent the establishment of a Kurdish autonomous enclave in Syria, allowed the smuggling of weapons and of jihadists through Turkey to ISIS. There are also allegations that Turkey was complicit in helping ISIS find commercial outlets to sell its oil. Isn’t that amazing? Somehow, all major contributors of this so-called coalition of the willing, United States, Britain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, have contributed in some shape or form directly in establishing ISIS’s hegemony in the region.

Given that the Turkish government has for decades fought the PKK (the Kurdish Workers’ Party, the Marxist wing of the Kurdish resistance) and oppressed the Kurdish people’s right to self-determination, in Turkey and throughout the region, it’s not surprising that as of today Turkey has no interest in saving Kobane.

It is my firm belief that that not only do global left-wing movements have a lot to learn from the Rojava Revolution, but the fate of these movements is undeniably linked to the struggle of the Kurdish forces in Kobane.

The revolutionary thesis of Rojava is the overcoming the paradigm of the nation-state. The theory of democratic confederalism, which was theorized by the previous and now jailed leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, in the first volume of his prison notebooks entitled the Roots of Civilization. Drawing extensively from the theories of libertarian municipalism, social ecology, and communalism, notably elaborated by Murray Bookchin, the PKK have succeeded in creating a radical new blueprint not only for left-wing movements in the region but also throughout the world.

kobane

The PKK, through the KCK (Group of Communities in Kurdistan), has created a unique synthesis of eco-socialism with an important emphasis on the aspects of the notion of ungrowth; decentralized libertarian socialism, with the setting-up of a unique structure of decentralized and communal direct democracy; and of feminist and alter-globalization theories through the deconstruction of the theory of the nation-state, the participation and citizenship of all of the diverse array of ethnic groups enshrined in their constitution.

It is my heartfelt wish that it won’t, but Kobane may fall, like the workers’ councils of Barcelona fell to the hands of Franco’s fascist thugs during the Spanish Civil War, but its memory and the project will live on. For the sake of humanity, it is our duty to support and to remember the awesome struggle and ideal of the Rojava Revolution. It is my wish, that through the lessons learnt from Kobane and the Rojava Revolution, we will see the dawn of a reinvigorated Kurdish struggle, and also the dawn of a new chapter in left-wing movements.

Amidst the chaos unleashed by the opening of the Pandora’s Box that is neo-liberal capitalism, Kobane is the Thermopylae of the Kurdish people and of everyone who dares to dream a better future for all of humanity.

A luta continua.